It is obvious to observers that there are distinct roles inside each work unit / ‘Department’ of any organisation, and that people usually are found to be “incumbents of” specific roles for sustained periods of time. And yet, we all recognise that all those roles are complementary – together they achieve some outcomes expected from the function, as a whole. In fact, those employees have their jobs so that those outcomes are reached.
And when we think of the various tasks employees work on as part of their role, the list seems too long to spell out. Yet, this needs to be made manageable. The overall Functional Capabilities needed to bring about the desired business results / outcomes need to be named. Only when they are named, can they be assessed and measured.
As Lord Kelvin highlighted, “I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.”
(- Lecture on “Electrical Units of Measurement”, 3rd May, 1883)
In this write-up, and the next few regarding Functional Capability, we share our thoughts about the categories of such Capabilities that we typically come across, so that they can be named appropriately for various functions. These write-ups have been written with various audiences in mind. The immediate reason to write them is as background reading for authors of the Functional Competence Models and Knowledge-Skill Dictionaries that we develop for organisations (the interested reader could get in touch with us to learn more about them). We need to get a lot many more people to author those Models competently. Besides them, these write-ups, we believe, should also be of interest (as spurs for reflection) to Department Heads and other senior leaders, as also to many verticals of the HR function, and to functions such as Strategic Planning, Knowledge Management and Change Management.
Make Happen or Let Happen?
Let’s begin by observing that one of the bases on which functions can be classified is, to what extent its goals are set at and driven by the leaders. There are thus two kinds of work units out there. The vast majority of them are those where goals are set by leaders, and then driven by them for the performance period (mind you, this typically does not mean that team members have no leeway to do their own thing – in fact, even theoretically, all such leeway cannot be eliminated. Depending on various factors, the team might in fact have much freedom to decide their actions to achieve those set targets). Let’s call them Make Happen functions.
Another extreme possible is where the leader of a work unit almost does not set goals – the leader merely listens to goal ideas of the team members and plays the role of achieving consensus on priorities, what-by-when’s and budgets. Let’s call them Let Happen functions.
In reality, however, as already stated, there is no pure Make Happen or Let Happen function. Consider this popular quote of Steve Jobs, the one person who had a reputation of having run his ship in a strongly ‘Make Happen’ mode: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” Clearly then, Jobs was unwilling to direct people beyond a certain level of specificity, and then wanted to hear back from them on what was to be done.
There are, of course, various views on what mode is good for what kind of work. Cultural dimensions, particularly Hofstede’s dimensions called Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance are worth mentioning here as well: not all societies deal with a given type of work with the same kind of organisational processes. In low power distance societies, for instance, leaders might struggle to get their formulations of goals accepted by the team, whereas in high power distance societies, followers might be bewildered if asked by the leader to decide among themselves, the goals of the team.
In our experience, in the Indian corporate world, most work units operate predominantly in a ‘Make Happen’ mode. In this series of blog posts, therefore, we will initially focus on functions that are run in this mode.
Clearly then, Jobs was unwilling to direct people beyond a certain level of specificity, and then wanted to hear back from them on what was to be done.
Make Happen Functional Capabilities
Every organisational function exists to meet a requirement of the business: raise funds, create new products, develop vendors, produce, service, sell, and so on. This, in some literature, has been called the primary task (typically this is identified for roles rather than for functions). Identifying this is usually not a challenge. Authors of Functional Competence Models need to ensure that they language this central capability aptly. As the good and old study by Hackman and Oldham pointed out, perceived ‘Task Significance’ is one of the key job characteristics impacting the psychological states of the performers.
An example: while interviewing the head of an analytics unit, the person mentioned that they also handled ‘ad hoc requests’ from a couple of teams to extract and analyse data, and provide reports. A little conversation, and we realised that this was very much part of the core deliverable of the unit. We languaged it as Providing Analytics Support.
Quality gurus have documented the types of dimensions that such central capabilities have. For instance, the well-known ServQual framework languages Service Quality for an organisation in five dimensions:
Tangibles: Appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel, and communication materials
Reliability: Ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately
Responsiveness: Willingness to help customers and provide prompt service
Assurance: Knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust and confidence
Empathy: Caring, individualized attention the firm provides its customers
Similarly, David Garvin’s classification of product quality into eight dimensions is also widely recognised and repeated across industries as an accepted framework: performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics, and perceived quality.
Whatever that ‘primary task’ and the set of central capabilities is, the function needs to work on continuously improving its ability to deliver on it. Improving ability to deliver usually starts with understanding customer needs. Which customer? This, surprisingly, is a vexed issue. Every step in any process has a natural customer, the next step of the process. But this hiding behind process sanctity can sometimes lead to unacceptable delays experienced by the paying customers of the business – this is when the word ‘bureaucracy’ typically gets used.
In general, when processes are sub-optimal in their design, being process-oriented leads to issues for one or more stakeholders. And, here is the rub: given the vast array of technology, tool and method choices available today, and given how customer expectations are galloping ahead, spurred by communication by competitors and industry disruptors, one is never sure that processes are not sub-optimal. The Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius, is ever relevant for all functions in all organisations. The quest for a better way is unending.
Those listening, reflecting processes of the unit to draw in feedback, ideas and suggestions for improvement, to create priorities among them, to decide the changes needed, and to act upon them accordingly, in themselves, form a supportive capability of the unit.
There are several supportive capabilities that well-run functions display. Some of them have been highlighted in this series of blog posts. In generating such lists, one runs smack into what is famously known in philosophy as David Hume’s ‘Problem of Induction’. A couple of sentences from plato.stanford.edu should suffise to outline the problem …
Hume asks on what grounds we come to our beliefs about the unobserved on the basis of inductive inferences… how to explain why we form any conclusions that go beyond the past instances of which we have had experience. Hume stresses that he is not disputing that we do draw such inferences. The challenge, as he sees it, is to understand the “foundation” of the inference—the “logic” or “process of argument” that it is based upon.
One might argue that there are at least as many capabilities of a unit as there are observers. How can one come up with a reasonable set of categories – comprehensive, useful, widely agreed upon, and yet, contained?
We have been studying Functional Capability for well more than a decade, now. We have studied over 200 functions across organisations in various sectors (“studied” briefly implies the following: been given an overview of the function by one of its leaders, interviewed at least one person for each role in the function, authored the ‘Functional Competence Model’ of the function, including its ‘Knowledge-Skill Dictionary’, and got the Model ratified by the leaders of the function). We have therefore had the opportunity to hear various ideas about Capability. We have answered the question of categorisation of Functional Capabilities for our work on the basis of a few constructs. A brief outline:
There have been very many observers of the phenomenon called ‘organisation’. Gareth Morgan was an especially astute observer – and a lucid writer to boot. His Images of Organisation can perhaps be re-read several times without any feeling of boredom. Perhaps triggered by this beautiful piece of work, Bolman and Deal put together Reframing Organisations. Separately, Arie de Guys wrote a splendid book, The Living Company, based on his experiences at Shell. And Peter Senge put together the slightly difficult-to-read, but very thought-provoking book, The Fifth Discipline. Between these books (and a few others that are farther out, such as Capra’s Web of Life), one has a rich set of metaphors to look at organisations by. The reader of these can readily see that there are some metaphors that are more relevant to organisations that are, what one would call ‘healthy’, while some others might be more applicable to those that are ‘unhealthy’. We have chosen to accentuate through our models, metaphors that we associate with organisational health, such as: machine, organism, brain, cultural unit. We are not attempting to describe them here – the reader is encouraged to read up the rich literature referred to above.
The other, corroborative reference frame we use is a more pragmatic one: that any organisation has a more or less fixed set of stakeholders – investors and creditors, customers, vendors and partners, employees, regulatory, tax, statutory, community and media (one can also see fellow players in the industry – read competition- as stakeholders in some senses of the term; also, what about the environment? We see it reflected most clearly in regulatory requirements. It is also reflected in community and media concerns.). Functions, being the units of organisation, need to contain the capabilities to address the needs and expectations of the various stakeholders. However, since organisations contain very many functions, typically, no function holds capabilities to address the needs and expectations of all stakeholders, that too, all by themselves.
While interviewing leaders of and role holders within functions, we essentially try and cotton on to the various stated and unstated persistent anxieties that the function focuses on. These arise on the one hand, due to the central capability of the function, and on the other, due to the needs and expectations of the stakeholders. Most supporting capabilities of functions are born out of these anxieties, as a reading of the other blog posts in this series will reveal.
There is, therefore, a fair bit of ambiguity we deal with here. Firstly, we are surmising about the function, and languaging their capabilities. Our own lenses and filters – ‘Mental Models’ of Senge or ‘Theories-in-Use’ of Argyris and Schon – are at work. And since we work in teams, there are multiple lenses and filters to work with. Secondly, we are surmising based on data in the form of provided documents and interviews. There are Theories in Use there as well.
However, we would like to assert that, compared to the contemporary approach of using, organisation-wide, as criteria set, only a single behavioural competency model, we are providing a far better solution to people management. At least now, the Theories in Use (filtered by the authors’ mental models) in the various functions are out in the open. Teams are then free to re-language what it is that the function does (and has, or ought to have, the capability to do). Perhaps more importantly, employees work with assessment and development parameters that make ready sense to them. They don’t have to wonder how behavioural competencies are relevant to their role (have you ever watched a Maintenance Manager and a Maintenance Engineer discuss the meaning of ‘Customer Orientation’ or ‘Drive for Results’ in the context of the latter’s role?).
As an aside, this pandemic has suddenly made businesses realise that there are yet other dimensions to improve upon, that have been frequently named as ‘resilience’ and ‘agility’: working with different vendors and service providers, working without the need for physical presence at workplace, ability to modify production lines quickly to produce different products, and so on. However, as we do not see these anxieties persisting beyond CY 2021, we reckon these concerns are a passing meeting time filler.
The list of blog posts we have put out is not intended to be an exhaustive coverage of Functional Capabilities (we wonder whether that can be achieved). But neither is it intended to be merely indicative. Hopefully, of the typical functions that the reader is likely to be familiar with, across various organisations, this list will suffise to describe the capabilities of most of them.
References :
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. Miller, George A. Psychological Review 1956.
[Book] Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. Argyris, C., & Schon, D. San Francisco: Jossey Bass 1974.
[Book] Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Polanyi, M. University of Chicago Press 1958.
[Book] Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Lakoff, George. The University of Chicago Press 1987.
